Hello all,

A big thank you to everyone who took the time to test and reply. I
think it's fairly clear that the script wasn't doing what it was
supposed to :).

For some reason, having the default (en, en-us, en-gb, en-ca...) at
the top of the if.. else statements made the browser ignore all the
others below. So the default has been moved to the bottom of the list.
You should now see the NL name and link match what your browser
reports for most languages - certainly, all the languages discussed
here. So please give it another try - I have tried it in a couple of
different languages and it worked.

Next, I will address the use of a flag icon to represent languages,
and then I will respond to individual points some of you have made
(earliest responses first).


----- FLAG ICON -----

Firstly, thanks to Andrea for explaining the rationale of this
decision. I will go into a little more depth below.

The flag graphic is identical to GNOME's Language Support icon -
please see http://fakap.net/drop/files/admin_printing.png
It is a blue 'generic' or 'neutral' flag with a UN-like emblem on it.

I agree that there is no 1:1 correspondence between language, flag,
geographic location, etc. However, depicting the concept of language
graphically in a small (<20x20 pixels) icon is problematic. We could
use the NLC icon, but I don't think it is recognizable to the average
user as representing what we already know it represents. We are
targeting visitors who probably don't know what the NLC icon means.

In practical terms (i.e., convention on the web), I think that a flag
icon is the most clear way of denoting a language. Especially because
it has a slight resemblance to the UN flag, and the UN has a number of
different official languages (of course, OOo has many more!).

OOo and almost every other major software application still uses a
floppy disk to represent "save" - a concept dating some 20+ years.
Hardly anyone still saves files on a floppy disk. But the icon is so
strongly tied to the concept of saving a file that it continues to be
used (and will probably continue to be used for a long time). If there
had a hard disk, which is what most people save files onto nowadays,
users would get lost - they will be looking for the floppy disk icon!
The neutral flag, then, is a kind of 'floppy disk' icon for web users.

I hope this explains the rationale behind the use of a flag icon. If
you think there is a better alternative, please keep the discussion
around this issue going.


----- INDIVIDUAL RESPONSES -----

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 11:41 PM, Cor Nouws <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> [...]
> In the Dutch loclized version og Epiphany/Gnome on Debian, the brackets show
> [en], and not [nl]

I'm afraid I can't do much about what the browser reports - unless
there is some special way to deal with it (i.e. Konqueror uses a _
instead of a - for reporting browser language - e.g., en_US instead of
en-US).

However, I did a quick Google search and this might be a bug specific
to Epiphany:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/epiphany-browser/+bug/232259

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 11:42 PM, Gaute Hvoslef Kvalnes
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> [...]
> My Norwegian Nynorsk Firefox shows "[nn-no]" and a blue-ish (default?)
> flag. Both "nb" and "nn" should redirect to the "no" project.

Thanks for pointing that out. I have updated the script accordingly.

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 11:57 PM, Yosuke Kato <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Furthermore, when visiting with IE, the right top headers
> (language detection, the text about login, and search box)  doesn't
> appear until I change the window size of IE. If the IE window has been
> maximized, this problem doesn't happen.

This annoying bug ("feature"?) is slowing down the implementation of
the new header :(. Although it only occurs on test.OOo, it will
definitely be fixed before we launch it.

On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 2:31 AM, Charles-H. Schulz
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> [...]
> - I have ran quick tests on my Mac OS X Leopard with Firefox 3.04, Safari
> 3.2.1 and even Omniweb 5.8 (a Mac browser using Webkit): there is no general
> issue, although both Safari and Omniweb will display [fr-fr] wheras Firefox
> will only show [fr]

Thanks for pointing that out! I have now set the script to trim the
reported language to the first two characters, which should solve the
above problem and broaden the number of locales that receive a custom
translation in the header.


Regards,
Ivan.

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